Urinary tract infection at a specialist hospital in Saudi Arabia

Midstream specimens of urine from inpatients and out patients at King Fahd Specialist Hospital in Buraidah, Saudi Arabia, were collected over a period of 12 months to determine prospectively the frequencies of different causative organisms and their antimicrobial susceptibility. A total of 854 from 4157 specimens (20.54%) gave significant bacterial counts i.e., counts greater than 10(5) organisms per millilitre. Escherichia coli was the commonest organism (50.11%) followed by Klebsiella spp. (28.33%) Pseudomonas spp. (7.84%) and Proteus spp. (4.91%). Other bacterial pathogens were Enterococcus spp. (3.98%), Acinetobacter spp. (1.84%), Staphylococcus aureus (1.63%), Enterobacter spp. (0.35), Staphylococcus epidermidis (0.30%), Haemolytic streptococci B (0.47%) and Salmonella paratyphi A (0.12%). In vitro drug sensitivity tests showed norfloxacin and nalidixic acid to be very effective for most of the strains of the bacterial pathogens. A very high proportion of strains of Escherichia coli (86%) and Klebsiella spp. (94.6%) were found to be resistant to ampicillin.